Definitions:
Basic Concepts of Identity and Immigrants' Cultural Identity
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Diaspora & Hybridity: e.g. P. Gilroy's The Black Atlantic; Homi Bhabha
Related terms: in-betweenness, liminality, creolization, mestizaje.
- P. Gilroy's 'The Black Atlantic': an 'international and transnational formation' which 'provides a means to re-examine the problems of nationality, location, identity, and historical memory" (1993: ix; 16).
- S. Hall's "New Ethnicity": the new black ethnicities visible in contemporary Britain are results of the 'cut-and-mix' processes of 'cultural diaspora-ization' (Morley & Chen eds. 1996: 446-447) (Cf. "Cultural Identity and Diaspora")
- Homi Bhabha: Transnational/Translational Culture
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Issues:
- place (home) and displacement (homelessness)
"It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of identity comes into being; the concern with the development or recovery of an effective identifying relationship between self and place. A valid and active sense of self may have been eroded by dislocation, resulting from migration, the experience of enslavement, transportation, or 'voluntary' removal for indentured labour. Or it may have been destroyed by cultural denigration, the conscious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality and culture by a supposedly superior racial or cultural model.
- Identity and language: (More . . . )
"--one feature: the gap which opens between the experience of place and the language available to describe it
language--1. inadequate to describe a new place, 2. systematically destroyed by enslavement, 3. rendered unprivileged by the imposition of the language of a colonizing power.
--linguistic alienation [silencing]; linguistic displacement of the pre-colonial language by English (Ashcroft 8-9 )
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